This journal has been deleted and purged.
She’s vanished. Every single chapter of “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart”: gone with the rest of her.
“O lamentations,” Abel sighs, hand to forehead. “hey_mamacita doesn’t love us anymore.”
I try to swallow. “Guess not.”
“Maybe Miss Max ordered a hit on her.”
“Heh.”
“Whatever shall we do without her literary genius to write us into being?” he snorts.
I hand his phone back and wipe the sweat off my palms, playing it off like I’m scratching my knees. I can’t let him see I care. Not this much. “Hope she’s okay,” I shrug.
“Are you kidding? She’s probably passed out from happiness somewhere.” Abel flops on his back and hangs his tongue out the side of his mouth. “I mean, what else is she going to do? We’re together now. Mission accomplished.”
Or maybe…
“What if something bad happened?”
“Pssh. Like what?”
“What if we embarrassed her when we told them we knew about them, and she got in her car all upset, and then—”
It would be your fault.
“Yeahhh, okay,” Abel smirks. “And what if she stayed in her house five minutes longer to watch our post, and then when she got to Starbucks the guy in front of her took the last scone so she had a bran muffin instead and choked to death on a raisin?”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. That’s your whole problem.” He kisses me on the cheek and yanks my Vegas cap over my eyes. “I’m sure your little fic friend is fine.”
“Why would she stand them up, though?”
“I don’t know.” He swings his legs off the bed. “She probably got bored. Maybe she found some repressed Star Trek vloggers who are even hotter than us and—ow! Dammit.”
He rubs his heel.
“What?”
He shakes his head, grabs something off the floor.
“Ugh, these things are so cheap. Can’t believe I paid ten bucks for one. Think fast!”
He throws it to me. It’s the mechanical heart from the Castaway Ball, a wide jagged crack exposing its insides.
“Do us both a huge favor, okay?” Abel says.
I flip the switch. The blue heart-light stutters, then winks out.
“Don’t get superstitious.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I’m shut in a bathroom stall at the Royal Court Inn & Conference Center in Salt Lake City, rubbing Plastic Sim’s head for luck.
Q&A with Della Wolfe-Williams. Fifteen minutes away. Since we woke up this morning, I’ve checked the Church of Abandon four times from my phone, trying to do it in secret places like these. I thumb through the few new posts.
Still no sign of hey_mamacita.
And this is on page 1.
thanks4caring:
you guys plz don’t flame me but now that b&a are together for real I’m like a little bit over them…I think I just shipped them cause I thought it would never happen but now that it did I actually think they make kind of a bad couple…like there’s no way it’s actually going to last w/ them…probly mamacita thought so too lol
I just stand there with my back up against the door, reading and rereading that post and the eight others that “surprisingly, sort of agree” with her. I’ve seen this kind of thing before in fandom. Shippers slowly jumping ship, communities unraveling once their leaders disappear.
I shove it out of my mind. None of this matters. It’s fiction. You have a boyfriend, for real.
My phone shrieks at me. HOME CALLING.
I stuff it in my pocket and bang out of the stall.
***
“I’m so freaking nervous,” Bec says. “I’ll babble like an idiot. I know it.”
The three of us huddle by the stage in the cold Q&A room, ticking off the seconds till Della Wolfe-Williams. Bec’s Zara Lagarde action figure peeps out of her shirt pocket. She’s debating whether to wait in the autograph line after the Q&A, but I’m only half listening. The crowd is almost too calm. I glance back at the closed doors. Pull my sweatshirt tight around me. I feel like I’m waiting for something besides Della: a random gunman, a fire breaking out in the corner.
“She’s just a person,” says Abel. “Honestly? When I saw Ed Ransome in person my crush kinda eased up a tiny bit. Right Bran?”
He elbows me.
“Right. Yeah. Mine too, a little.”
“Yeah, well, you had other stuff going on that night.” She holds Plastic Lagarde up to her cheek and bats her eyes. “Will you all wait in line with me? Please please please?”
“Sure—oh. We can’t, babe.” Abel knocks the heel of his hand against his head. “We’ve got that stupid-ass lunch with Miss Maxima.”
I forgot all about that. “Ugh.”
“Brandon, tell me what possessed us to call a truce with her again? Was it really just postcoital bliss?”
“’Fraid it was.”
“Aw. You guys,” Bec saps, messing up my hair. She still thinks we’re moving too fast, I can tell, but she’s been nice enough to act totally happy for us this week. I relax a little. I swing my arm around her waist and give her a squeeze.
“Oh farts, there she is.” Abel pokes me. “The one and only.”
He points. My eyes connect his finger to a girl on the far side of the room, shouldering her way through the crowd. Miss Maxima looks just like she does in her profile picture on the Cadsim comm. Like one of those women they used to warn sailors about when my great-great uncles were in the war: fake mole, leopard pillbox hat, tight red dress with big black buttons, five-alarm lipstick on a sideways smirk. She’s dragging along a short doughy kid with a paler, plainer version of her face; the girl’s got on a cartoon vampire t-shirt and she looks like she wants to disappear. I would too if Maxima was my big sister.
Hello boys, Miss Maxima mouths, her red lips enlarging each syllable. She sends us a dainty finger-wave.
“Gross,” says Abel.
“Completely,” I say.
“She’s so amazing,” says Bec.
We both whip around.
“Not Miss M,” Bec eyerolls. “Della Wolfe-Williams. Did you know she’s a first-degree black belt in tai chi?” She pets the bio in the CastieCon program. “She has two Siberian huskies and on the weekends she goes mountain biking and makes salsa verde from scratch.” She blushes. “Sorry.”
“Dear fangirl,” Abel says, “have you no idea who you’re talking to?”
“Do you think she’d take a picture with Plastic Lagarde?”
“Dunno. She seems deadly serious. You should grease her up with some sweet talk about the feminist subtexts of the swamp-monster episode. Or tell her you write fic where Lagarde saves the world with her magic vagina.” He winds his arms around me from behind. “What do you think, Bran?”
I hear the words but they breeze right through me. I’m thinking of “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart,” blipped out of existence with the rest of hey_mamacita, the copy I salvaged filed sad and unfinished in a private folder on my laptop.
“Sure,” I mutter, but no one hears.
Della Wolfe-Williams is coming.
You see her legs first, the thigh-high black warrior boots with skull-shaped buckles and impossible heels. Leather pants, studded belt, brown tank top two shades darker than her skin. Her buzzcut’s grown out into short little spikes that look soft and hard at the same time. No makeup except a sharp perfect outline around each eye.
“I want to be her when I grow up,” Bec whispers.
“So do I,” whispers Abel.
Della’s sweeping the lip of the stage, letting her fingers brush fans’ outstretched hands. Her face is this cool haughty mask and I wonder if she’s smiling inside, parodying herself just a little. She used words like obdurate and paradigm in her last Popwatch interview, so probably not.
She grabs the mike like a weapon.